The Human Race

We mean by species, when applied either to animals or vegetables, the fundamental type, and by variety or race the different beings which result from the influence of climate, of nutriment, and of mixture with individuals of the same species. The species dog gives birth to the varieties or races known under the names of bull-dog, spaniel, mastiff, &c. The species horse gives birth to the races or varieties known under the names of the Arabian, English, Normandy, Corsican, &c. The species turkey produces the varieties known as the wild turkey, the black and the white turkey. In the vegetable kingdom, the cotton plant species produces the American and the Indian cotton; the bramble produces the innumerable varieties which are known to us as rose-trees.

But, the reader will say, how are we to distinguish race from species, and does there exist any practical means of deciding whether the animal under consideration belongs to a species or a race? We reply that such a means does exist, which enables us to speak with certainty in every case. It is of importance that this should be made known in order that every one may test it for himself.

Take the two animals in question, unite them, and if that connexion of the sexes results in the production of another individual, capable of reproduction, this will indicate race or variety. If, however, the union of the two individuals is unproductive, or the offspring is itself barren, this will indicate two individuals of different species.

In spite of observations and experiments made in the course of many thousand years, reproduction has never been procured by mixture of a rabbit with a hare, a wolf with a dog, a sheep with a goat. It is true that hybrids are obtained between the horse and she-ass, and between the ass and the mare, but it is well known that the individuals produced by this mixture, namely, the quadrupeds termed mules, are barren animals, incapable of reproduction with one another.

This rule is not confined to the animal kingdom, but it obtains also among vegetables. You can obtain artificial production from a pear tree by applying, with suitable precautions, the pollen of the flowers of one pear tree to the stamens of those of another. Fruit will be formed, and the seed which that produces will in its turn be productive. But if you attempt to perform the same operation between a pear tree and an apple tree, you will obtain no result whatever. This, again, is the practical method which enables botanists to distinguish varieties from species. The test of artificial fecundation between one plant and another, which it is desired to distinguish as regards their species, serves to solve the difficulties which are met in attempting to determine the position of a plant in botanical classification.

The word species therefore is not a fictitious term, a conventional expression invented by the learned to designate the classifications of living beings. A species is a group arranged by Nature herself. Fruitfulness or barrenness in the products of the mixture are the characteristics which Nature attaches to variety or to species; those groups therefore appear to us as though they had a substantial foundation in the laws which govern living beings, and we do but render in speech what we observe in Nature.

When, moreover, we reflect, we easily understand that if Nature had not instituted species the most complete disorder would have reigned throughout living creation. By intermixture the animal kingdom would have been overrun by mongrels who would have confused every type, thus permitting of no discernment in this crowd of incoherent products. The whole animal kingdom would have been given over to inextricable confusion. In like manner, if plants had been capable of infinite variety through the mixture of different species, brought about by the industry of man, or by the effect of the wind bearing through the air the fertilizing pollen, there would be nought but trouble and disorder among the vegetable population of the globe.

Species therefore has a necessary, providential, and fixed existence. Impossibility of union is the distinctive qualification which nature assigns to this group of living beings. Reproduction is possible only between members of the same species, and the differences produced in their offspring by the soil, nutriment and surrounding circumstances, determine what we call race, or variety.

The principle which we have just enunciated, will in its application to man enable us to decide whether the individuals that people the globe, belong to different species of men, or simply to races or varieties; in other words, whether the human species is unique, and whether the different human types known to us, the white, black, yellow, brown and red-man, belong or not to races of the human species.

The reply to this question will doubtless have been anticipated. If we apply the rule stated above, all men that inhabit the globe belong to one and the same species, since it is a fact that men and women, whatever be their colour, can marry, and their offspring is always reproductive. The Negro and white female by their union produce mulattoes; mulattoes and mulattresses are reproductive, as are also their descendants – marriages between members of the red or brown races are fruitful, and, what is more, the fecundity of the descendants of mongrels is superior to that of men and women of the same colour.

Unless, therefore, we regard men as a solitary exception among all living beings, unless we withdraw them from the operation of the universal laws of nature, we must come to the conclusion that they do but form a certain number of races of one and the same species, and all descend from one primitive unique species.

Men are brothers in blood: this principle of universal fraternity imposed by nature, may be placed side by side with the corresponding maxim suggested by the moral sense.

Those who deny the unity of the human species, polygenists, or supporters of the plurality of human kind, base their arguments in favour of there being more than one species, upon the assertion that the distinction between the Negro and the white man is too great to permit of their possibly being classed together. But, between the lap-dog and the mastiff, the wild and tame rabbit, the spaniel and the greyhound, or the Shetland and Russian horse, there is a much greater difference than exists between the Negro and the white man. We are unable to state exactly, or to explain with any degree of accuracy, how it is that man, as he was first created, has given birth to races so widely different as the white, black, yellow, brown, and red which people the earth at the present day. We can but furnish a general explanation of what we see in the widely varying conditions of existence, and in the opposite character of the media through which man, for ages past, has dragged his existence, frequently with much difficulty and uncertainty. If the dog, the horse, the rabbit, and the turkey, through the agency of human industry applied to them during a period of scarcely two thousand years, have given birth to so many varieties, how much more would man, whose appearance upon the globe is of such antiquity that we cannot assign to it even approximatively a date – man, whose fate it has been to pass through so many different climates, such various physical and social positions, expect to see his own type become modified and transformed? We should, with more reason, feel surprised at finding that the differences between one variety and another are not much wider than they appear to be.

In order to avoid this argument, there remains to the supporters of the plurality of human kind no alternative but to regard man as an exception in nature; to assert that he has laws peculiar to himself, and that the principles which pervade the life of plants and animals can in no way apply to him. But man, who is an organized and living being, and is furnished with a body that differs but little from that of any mammiferous animal, is, so far as concerns his organization, subject to the universal laws of nature, and that of intermixture among the rest. It is therefore impossible to admit the question of exception raised by those who deny the unity of the human species.

The principle that the human species is one, and what follows as a natural conclusion, namely, that all men who inhabit the earth are but races or varieties of this one species, will, therefore, appear to the reader to be satisfactorily established.

These different races which originate in one species, the primitive type having been modified by the operation of climate, food, soil, intermixture and local customs, differ, it must be admitted, to a marvellous extent, in their outward appearance, colour and physiognomy. The differences are so great, the extremes so marked and the transitions so gradual, that it is well-nigh impossible to distribute the human species into really natural groups from a scientific point of view, that is to say, groups founded upon organic characteristics. The classification of the human races has always been the stumbling block of anthropology, and up to the present time the difficulty remains almost undiminished.

A cursory examination of the various classifications which have been brought forward by the most important of those who have essayed the task will make this truth apparent to all.

Buffon, in his chapter upon man; a work which we can always read again with admiration and advantage, contents himself with bringing forward the three fundamental types of the human species which have been known from the first under the names of the white, black and yellow race. But these three types in themselves do not exemplify every human physiognomy. The ancient inhabitants of America, commonly known as the Red-Skins, are entirely overlooked in this classification, and the distinction between the Negro and the white man cannot always be easily pointed out, for in Africa the Abyssinians, the Egyptians, and many others, in America the Californians, and in Asia the Hindoos, Malays and Javanese are neither white nor black.

Blumenbach, the most profound anthropologist of the last century, and author of the first actual treatise upon the natural history of man, distinguished in his Latin work, De Homine, five races of men, the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay and American. Another anthropologist, Prochaska, adopted the divisions pointed out by Blumenbach, but united under the name of the white race, Blumenbach’s Caucasian and Mongolian groups, and added the Hindoo race.

The eloquent naturalist Lacépède, in his Histoire naturelle de l’Homme, added to the races admitted by Blumenbach the hyperborean race, comprising the inhabitants of the northern portion of the globe in either continent.

Cuvier fell back upon Buffon’s division, admitting only the white, black and yellow races, from which he simply derived the Malay and American races.

A naturalist of renown, Virey, author of l’Histoire naturelle du Genre humain, l’Histoire naturelle de la Femme, and of many other clever productions upon natural history and particularly anthropology, gave much attention to the classification of the human races. But he was not favourable to the unity of our species, being led to entertain the opinion that the human species was twofold. This was the starting point of an erroneous deviation in the ideas of naturalists who wrote after Virey. We find Bory de Saint Vincent admitting as many as fifteen species of men, and another naturalist, Desmoulins, doubtless influenced by a feeling of emulation, distinguished sixteen human species, which, moreover, were not the same as those admitted by Bory de Saint Vincent.

This course of classification might have been followed to a much greater extent, for the differences among men are so great, that if strict rule is not adhered to, it is impossible to fix any limit to species. Unless therefore the principle of unity has been fully conceded at starting, the investigation may result in the admission of a truly indefinite quantity.

This is the principle which pervades the writings of the most learned of all the anthropologists of our age, Dr. Pritchard, author of a Natural History of Man, which in the original text formed ten volumes, but of which the French language possesses but a very incomplete translation.

Dr. Pritchard holds that all people of the earth belong to the same species; he is a partisan of the unity of the human species, but is not satisfied with any of the classifications already proposed, and which were founded upon organic characteristics. He, in fact, entirely alters the aspect of the ordinary classifications which are to be met with in natural history. He commences by pointing out three families, which, he asserts, were in history the first human occupants of the earth: namely the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian. Having described these three families, Pritchard passes to the people who, as he says, radiated in various directions from the regions inhabited by them, and proceeded to occupy the entire globe.

This mode of classification, as we have pointed out, leaves the beaten track trodden by other natural historians. For this reason it has not found favour among modern anthropologists, and this disfavour has reacted upon the work itself, which, notwithstanding, is the most complete and exact of all that we possess upon man. Although it has been adopted by no other author, Pritchard’s classification of the human race appears to us to be the most sound in principle.

M. de Quatrefages, in his course of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History, Paris, makes a classification of the human race based upon the three types, white, yellow and black; but he appends to each of these three groups, under the head of mixed races attached to each stem, a number of races more or less considerable and arbitrary which were excluded from the three chief divisions.

The classification of M. de Quatrefages will be found in his Rapport sur les progrès de l’Anthropologie, published in 1867.3 It is extremely learned and well worked out, but a classification which entirely passes by the simple mode of reasoning we shall adopt in the following pages.

The classification of the human race which we propose to follow, modifying it where in our opinion it may appear to be necessary, is due to a Belgian naturalist, M. d’Omalius d’Halloy. It acknowledges five races of men: the white, black, yellow, brown and red.

This classification is based upon the colour of the skin, a characteristic very secondary in importance to that of organization, but which yet furnishes a convenient framework for an exact and methodical enumeration of the inhabitants of the globe, permitting a clear consideration of a most confused subject. In the groups, therefore, which we shall propose, the reader will fail to find a truly scientific classification, but will meet with merely such a simple distribution of materials, as shall permit us to review methodically the various races spread over every portion of the Earth’s surface.

CHAPTER II

General characteristics of the human race – Organic characteristics – Senses and the nervous system – Height – Skeleton – Cranium and face – Colour of the skin – Physiological functions – Intellectual characteristics – Properties of human intelligence – Languages and literature – Different states of society – Primitive industry – The two ages of prehistoric humanity.

Before entering upon a minute description of each of the human races, we shall find it well to lay before the reader a generalization of the characteristics which are common to all.

Since man is an intelligent being, living in an organized frame, our attention has to be directed to the consideration of his organs and intellect, that is, in the first place, we must investigate the physical, in the second, the intellectual and moral elements of his constitution.

The physical characteristics bear but secondary importance among those of the human race. Man is a spirit which shines within the body of an animal, and the only difficulty is to ascertain in what manner the organism of the mammalia is modified in order to become that of man; to compare the harmony of this organism with the object in view, namely the exercise of human intellect and thought. We shall see that the organs of the mammalia are greatly modified in the human subject, becoming, either on account of their individual excellence or the harmony of their combination, greatly superior to the associations of the same organs among animals.

Let us first consider the brain and organs of sense. When we examine the form and relative size of the brain in ascending the series of mammiferous animals, we find that this organ increases in volume, and progresses, so to say, toward the superior characteristics which it is to display in the human species. Disregarding certain exceptions, for the existence of which we cannot account, but which in no way alter the general rule, the brain increases in importance from the zoophyte to the ape. But, in comparing the brain of the ape with that of man, an important difference becomes at once apparent. The brain of the gorilla, orang-outang, or chimpanzee, which are the apes that bear the greatest resemblance to man, and which for that reason are designated anthropomorphous apes, is very much smaller than that of man. The cerebral lobes in man are much longer than in the anthropomorphous apes, and their vertical measure is out of all proportion with the height of the cerebral lobes in apes; this is what produces the noble frontal curve, one of the characteristic features of the human physiognomy. The cerebral lobes are connected behind with a third nervous mass called the cerebellum. The large volume of these three lobes, the depth and number of convolutions of the encephalic mass, and other anatomical details of the brain, upon which we are unable here to treat at greater length, place the brain of man very far above that of the animal nearest to him in the zoological scale. These differences bear witness in favour of man to an unparalleled intellectual development, and we should be better able to measure these differences, were we able to show in what the cerebral action consists, but this we are utterly unable to do.

The senses, taken individually, are not more developed in man than they are in certain animals; but in man they are characterised by their harmony, their perfect equilibrium, and their admirable appropriation to a common end. Man, it will at once be admitted, is not so keen of sight as the eagle, nor so subtle of hearing as the hare, nor does he possess the wonderful scent of the dog. His skin is far from being as fine and impressionable as that which covers the wing of a bat. But, while among animals, one sense always predominates to the disadvantage of the rest, and the individual is thus forced to adopt a mode of existence which works hand in hand with the development of this sense, with man, all the senses possess almost equal delicacy, and the harmony of their association makes up for what may be wanting in individual power. Again, the senses of animals are employed only in satisfying material necessities, while in man, they assist in the exercise of eminent faculties whose development they further.

Let us consider shortly in detail our senses.

Man is certainly better off, as regards the sense of sight, than a large majority of animals. Instead of being placed upon different sides of his head, looking in opposite directions, and receiving two images which cannot possibly be alike, his eyes are directed forwards, and regard similar objects, by which means the impression is doubled. The sense of sight thus brings to his conceptions a complete image and solid idea of what surrounds him; it is his most useful sense, the more so when it is guided in its application by a clear intellect.

The sense of touch in man reaches a degree of perfection which it does not attain in animals. How marvellous is the sense of touch when exercised by applying the extremities of the fingers, the part of the body the best suited to this function, and how much more wonderful is the organ called the hand, which applies itself in so admirable a manner to the most different surfaces whose extent, form, or qualities, we wish to ascertain!

A modern philosopher has attributed to the hand alone our intellectual superiority. This was going too far. We find enthusiasm allied with justice in the views expressed in the excellent pages which Galen has consecrated to a description of the hand, in his immortal work De usu partium.

“Man alone,” says Galen, “is furnished with hands, as he alone is a participator in wisdom. The hand is a most marvellous instrument, and one most admirably adapted to his nature. Remove his hand, and man can no longer exist. By its means he is prepared for defence or attack, for peace or war. What need has he of horns or talons? With his hand, he grasps the sword and lance, he fashions iron and steel. Whilst with horns, teeth and talons, animals can only attack or defend at close quarters, man is able to project from afar the instruments with which he is armed. Shot from his hand, the feathered arrow reaches at a great distance the heart of an enemy, or stops the flight of a passing bird. Although man is less agile than the horse and the deer, yet he mounts the horse, guides him, and thus successfully hunts the deer. He is naked and feeble, yet his hand procures him a covering of iron and steel. His body is unprotected against the inclemencies of climate, yet his hand finds him a convenient abode, and furnishes him with clothing. By the use of his hand, he gains dominion and mastery over all that lives upon the earth, in the air, or in the depths of the sea. From the flute and lyre with which he amuses his leisure, to the terrible instruments by means of which he deals death around him, and to the vessel which bears him, a daring seaman, upon the bosom of the deep – all is the work of his hand.

“Would man without hands have been able to write out the laws which govern him, or raise to the gods statues and altars? Without hands could he bequeath to posterity the fruit of his labours, and the memory of his deeds? Could he (had man been created handless) converse with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the different great men, children of bygone ages? The hand is then the physical characteristic of man, in like manner as intelligence is his moral characteristic.”

Galen, having shown in this chapter the general formation of the hand and the special disposition of the organs which compose it; having described the articulations and bones, the muscles and tendons of the fingers; and having analyzed the mechanism of the different movements of the hand, cries, full of admiration for this marvellous structure:

“In presence of the hand, this marvellous instrument, cannot we well treat with contempt the opinion of those philosophers who saw in the human body merely the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms! Does not everything in our organization most clearly give the lie to this false doctrine? Who will dare to invoke chance in explanation of this admirable disposition? No, it is no blind power that has given birth to all these marvels. Do you know among men a genius capable of conceiving and executing so perfect a work? There exists not such a workman. This sublime organization is the creation of a superior intelligence, of which the intellect of man is but a poor terrestrial reflection. Let others offer to the Deity reeking hecatombs, let them sing hymns in honour of the gods; my hymn of praise shall be the study and the exposition of the marvels of the human frame!”

The sense of hearing, without attaining in man the perfection which it reaches in certain animals, is nevertheless of great delicacy, and becomes an infinite resource of instruction and pure enjoyment. Not only are differences of intonation, intensity, and timbre, recognised by our ear, but the most delicate shades of rhythm and tone, the relations of simultaneous and successive sounds which give the sentiment of melody and harmony, are appreciated, and furnish us with the first and most natural of the arts – music. Thus the perfection and delicacy of our senses, which permit of our grasping faint and slightly varying impressions, the harmony of these senses themselves, their perfect equilibrium, their capability of improvement by exercise, place us at a considerable distance above the animal.